A fifth of teenagers who had experienced cyberbullying said it had made them consider suicide.
Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Cyberbullying is a worse problem among teenagers than drug abuse, according to almost half of all young people surveyed in a new study that finds one in five has experienced online abuse.

In the global YouGov survey of more than 4,700 teenagers from across the world, a fifth of those who had experienced cyberbullying said it had made them consider suicide, and more than half said being taunted online was worse than being bullied in person.

A quarter of those bullied closed down social media accounts and more than a fifth skipped school, the survey commissioned by Vodafone found. Of those who were bullied, almost 40% did not tell their parents, citing feelings of shame or fear.

Researchers spoke to 13- to 18-year-olds from the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, New Zealand, Greece, South Africa, US, Ireland and the Czech Republic.

Of the British children surveyed, more than half of those bullied said it had negatively affected their self-esteem, though fewer than one in five said they had been targeted and most thought face-to-face bullying was more upsetting.

New Zealand had the highest number of teenagers who said they had experienced cyberbullying, followed by the US and Iceland.

The director of the Vodafone Foundation, Andrew Dunnett, which is giving £100,000 to anti-bullying charities, said the results would be a “serious concern for any parent”.

“The new generation that was born digital thrives in a world of constant connectivity, but there are clear risks for young people as well as benefits – and it is striking that cyberbullying troubles many young people more than drug abuse,” he continued.

The phone giant has released a set of new emojis, selected by the surveyed teens, as part of an anti-bullying initiative, as a wordless way for social media users to express support for those being tormented online. The initiative was the brainchild of Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern turned campaigner, who gave a widely shared TED talk where she referred to herself as “patient zero” of online-shaming culture after her affair with then-President Bill Clinton.

“It may seem like a small action, but showing support and compassion to someone online who is being cyberbullied or harassed, has a large impact,” Lewinsky said in a statement for the the campaign’s launch. “The initiative is one of the myriad ways we can begin to shift the online culture.”

“What can be challenging is for people, particularly when they are young, can find it hard to show support for friends who are being bullied publicly online because they fear they’ll be bullied themselves, or they simply struggle to find the right words,” said Berkeley University psychologist Prof Dacher Keltner, who developed the emojis along with charity The Diana Award and Enable, a EU anti-bullying project.

“Images can be more powerful for them to use to show support or compassion,” he said.

Dacher Keltner, psychologist adviser on Pixar film Inside Out, explains why emojis can help tell victims of cyberbullying that they are not alone.

The majority of the young people surveyed said they found a combination of words and emojis the best way to express their feelings, rather than words alone, though only one in 10 said using pictures alone was easiest.

Last year, research at the London School of Economics found cyberbullying was now more common than face-to-face bullying, and almost a third of those surveyed said they had seen negative or abusive online content, including hate messages and self-harm sites.

A Department for Education spokesperson said the government was taking action to tackle cyberbullying, including £7m in resources for schools to tackle bullying.

“We have strengthened teachers’ powers to tackle bullying by giving them the freedom to search for and delete inappropriate images from phones and other electronic devices,” a spokesman said. “We have also made clear that teachers can discipline and investigate cases of bullying outside school.”